Dark Clouds - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 147

Raytheon developers put together a proile and used it to demonstrate how
Riot could predict where he would be (a speciic gym), on a particular
day (Monday), at a particular time (6 a.m.) (Gallagher 2013). The Riot
software was developed with the support of industry and government
experts, and by 2013 it was featured in a patent Raytheon pursued for
a system designed to gather information from social media, including
social networks, blogs, and other sources, to determine whether a person
should be judged a security risk. Public advocates like the Electronic Pri-
vacy Information Center raised concerns about the arrival of Big Brother
into the seemingly innocuous world of social media: “Social networking
sites are often not transparent about what information is shared and how
it is shared. Users may be posting information that they believe will be
viewed only by their friends, but instead, it is being viewed by govern-
ment oficials or pulled in by data collection services like the Riot search”
(ibid.). Actually, the cloud may be even darker than this. First, more than
just governments are interested in tracking people and predicting their
behavior. Businesses are also eager to follow people's moves in the cloud,
especially if a system like Riot enables them to forecast what products
or services they are likely to purchase. Furthermore, an arguably more
signiicant problem with Riot and systems like it is that they often make
mistakes with signiicant consequences. Riot and other such applications
appear so lawless that they receive the beneit of the doubt in disputes
about accuracy. Others doubt whether such systems can work successfully
to track down criminals and terrorists who operate in a less than ratio-
nal fashion, such as the brothers who engineered the Boston Marathon
bombings in 2013 (G. Silverman 2013).
The dark cloud of attacks on privacy and security is only part of the
story. The biggest challenges come not from outside attackers but from
within the cloud itself as companies increasingly recognize that an excel-
lent, if not the best, revenue stream lows from the data provided by their
own users. In fact, whereas 2013 may be remembered as the year we all got
hacked, perhaps it should also be known as the year we all got tracked. As
Maija Palmer maintained, “The new digital economy's biggest resource is
data. From Google's recording of internet search habits to Amazon's stor-
ing of credit card numbers, companies are busy pumping and extracting
data, all to grease the wheels of commerce” (2013b). No enterprise is more
aware of this than Facebook, which bases its business model on making the